We are pleased to announce that the Civic Commons Marketplace, currently in private beta, will be open to the general public next Monday. The Marketplace will launch publicly in conjunction with the announcement of GovFresh award winners on December 19 – the Marketplace will display the award winners. If you haven’t already submitted your entries or voted in the 2011 GovFresh awards, [...]

The Open311 platform is one of Civic Commons’ core initiatives; it’s an Application Programming Interface (API) and a growing set of software tools that help cities manage service and information requests from citizens. We see it as a core element of an “open” city IT backbone. Open311 is also a rapidly growing, collaborative, open source project [...]

The City of Columbus, OH, has just announced a mobile app that combines many of the aspects of Open311 and Open211. More and more cities are building similar information aggregating and issue reporting applications (such as Boston’s Citizens Connect), and we are encouraged to see that smaller companies are able to work with cities on [...]

What happens after open sourcing? Do people from elsewhere actually show up, to ask questions, find bugs, and help out? Six weeks ago, the Federal IT Dashboard was open-sourced. We assisted in that release (see our post) because we strongly believe that open collaboration is the natural path for government software, and because the IT [...]

As promised, the code for the federal IT Dashboard has now been released to the public as open source software. Any government can use it — for that matter, any contractor can pick up the code and offer deployment or other services based on it, which is a key ingredient for making it usable in practice by [...]

We’re pleased to announce that San Francisco’s Enterprise Addressing System has now been open sourced! EAS is a web-based system for managing the city’s master database of physical addresses, tied to Assessor’s parcels and the City’s street centerline network. We posted a short screencast of EAS in action a couple of months ago, and since [...]

Lawrence Grodeska, Internet Communications Coordinator at San Francisco Department of the Environment, is steering a diverse group of local agencies to create something greater than the sum of their parts: a centralized database for residents to find businesses that offer recycling, reuse and hazardous waste disposal services in the Bay Area. Enter your location and [...]

We’ve been looking at government publications systems lately, partly at the instigation of Beth Noveck, who leads the U.S. government’s Open Government Initiative [1]. Two of the most interesting are the Federal Register 2.0 and New York Law School’s CityAdmin system — they come at the problem from opposite directions, and comparing them is instructive. Federal Register [...]

We’ve been having some very exciting discussions with the San Francisco Department of Technology. They’re developing an “Enterprise Addressing System” (EAS): web-based software to help the city manage its master database of addresses, tied to the Assessor’s parcels and the City’s street centerline network (the project was initially called the Master Address Database, or MAD). [...]

One of the best-known federal open government initiatives, the Federal IT Dashboard, is about to go open source, as one of the first projects released into the Civic Commons. The IT Dashboard isn’t merely an open government tool in the sense of providing public access to information. It’s actually an IT governance tool: its primary [...]